OpenGL News Archives

The OpenGL Setup for GLSL tutorial describes the basic setup and required extensions (for pre OpenGL 2.0 developers) for including a vertex shader and a fragment shader into a a program. Sample source code is included.

VREng is an open source C++ and OpenGL API-based interactive distributed 3D application for navigating in and interacting with virtual environments over the Internet through their avatars, chat, audio/video channels, shared white-boards and document publishing. The new v6.x uses XML to describe VR environments, supports object persistence, new file types, and built in image capture. It run on Unix platforms (Linux, *Bsd, MacOSX, Solaris)using X11.

Rendering realistic moving water is one of the key techniques that immerse the viewers into interactive graphics world including computer games. This demos shows real-time particle-based fluid simulation using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. OpenGL ARB fragment and vertex programs are used for rendering the realistic fluid surface. The demo enables the user to interact with fluids.

The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library (GLEW) is a cross-platform C/C++ OpenGL API extension loading library that provides efficient run-time mechanisms for determining which OpenGL extensions are supported on the target platform. Core and extension functionality is exposed in a single header file. The latest v1.3.0 release adds support for core OpenGL 2.0 functionality, custom code generation for lean and mean applications, and a new function for efficient string-based extension queries. GLEW is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Irix, and Solaris.

Flexion Engine is a real-time OpenGL API-based 3D graphics rendering engine for next-generation GPUs. The new technology demo demonstrates the Dynamic Dual-Paraboloid Omnidirectional Soft Shadow Mapping. This technique enables to do omnidirectional-shadowing using only two shadow maps.

Omega Core 3D is a real-time extensible 3D game engine being used to develop the MMMORPG Caeron 3000. The code base is moving from Direct3D to OpenGL 2.0 (including the OpenGL Shading Language) in order to support cross platform portability, as well as embedded platforms.

Although the technique of alpha-blending has been around for a long time, it can be employed to produce impressive visual effects even on low-end hardware. These four demos, complete with GPL source code for Windows and Linux, present different uses of alpha-blending associated with 2D-texturing.

SPyRE (Simple Pythonic Rendering Engine) is a lightweight rendering engine for the OpenGL API. Provide pyOpenGL code to draw the model, and the SPyRE engine will display the model in an interface that provides zooming, panning and rotation of camera position using mouse and keyboard.

4D Voxels to 3D Surface is an OpenGL API-based advanced 4D stack visualization for medical applications, that features interactive measurement tools, slicing-dicing, real-time surface rendering, labeling and more. It is available as a standalon application or ActiveX component.

VR Juggler provides virtual reality software developers with a suite of APIs that abstract all interface aspects of their program including the display surfaces, object tracking, selection and navigation, and graphical user interfaces. An application written with VR Juggler can transparently move between a wide range of VR systems that support the OpenGL API. The V2.0 Beta 1 release features include modularization, additional compiler support, support for new scengraphs, new device drivers, and more.

GLIntercept is an OpenGL API function call interceptor that saves and tracks all OpenGL function calls, display list commands, and textures. It is useful for optimizing OpenGL API-based applications and games. The new v0.41 allows the editing and correction of ARB/NV VP/FP/GLSL shaders/programs at run time , free camera mode that lets you “fly” around the rendered scene to view what actual geometry is sent to the graphics card, and extension/version override so you can test low end rendering pathways without swapping cards.

Torque ShowTool Pro lets artists and programmers who uses GarageGames’ Torque Game Engine, to inspect their game art for esthetic and technical accuracy by simulating the in-game environment without having to wait for the game itself to load. It uses the OpenGL API for realtime rendering.